Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Brought to you by the past THREE DAYS I spent wasting on Tumblr and Pottermore. (Yes, POTTERMORE.) (It's really quite pretty! -- anyway.) Yes, there's a heat wave on, and it's hard to think, but my God, mopping the kitchen floor with half a paper towel and spit would be better than this.

- I will be emailing.
- I will not be, God help us all, blogging. I may do the bookpost thing, I don't know.
- I WILL NOT TOUCH TUMBLR. HAHAHA NO.
- I more or less broke myself of the Twitter and BadGoodReads habits, anyway, so that's not a problem. (Re the latter, that's one way to quit social media, get bullied off it! hah.)
- I will probably be commenting hither and goddamn yes yon.
- July 31st is when the rest of the fourth Potter book goes up on the game site, right? OH WELL

(I played BEJEWELLED today, I am so ashamed of myself. Usually I stick to Tetris, and occasionally e-"Mahjong" ((i.e. fancy-really culturally dubious-memory-solitaire)). I have no hand-eye coordination, no sense of direction, and my spatial navigation is for shit, but I fucking rock the house at Tetris. I had the highest score at my college, I think. Granted, the senior class was like all of eighty people, if that, but still. I am one of those read-upside-down-and-backwards-no-problem people. Pattern recognition is my game.)

Reading a book not only requires a complex set of skills involved in
decoding words and making meaning from them, but involves the
imagination, engages predictive thinking, and—depending on the content
and challenge of the material—invites reflection and the processing of
new information. Readers create the world of a book alongside the
author. Reading lights up the brain all over.

The truth is, the more “interactive” a book is, the less a reader is
required to engage meaningfully with it. When you add bells and whistles
that do the work for you, you’re actually making it less interactive,
neurologically speaking.

There is very little appreciation, for instance, of the many and subtle
moods possible in drunkenness; almost no registration of the workings of
the several minds inside a drinker's brain; hardly a trace of the
narcissism arid self-deceit which are so indispensable or of the
self-loathing and self-pity which are so invariable; hardly a hint,
except through abrupt action, of the desperation of thirst; no hint at
all of the many colorings possible in the desperation. The hangovers
lack the weakness, sickness, and horrible distortions of time-sense
which they need.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Five words of advice on reading Elizabeth Bowen: Resist the urge to skim. In The Death of the Heart, Bowen's writing rolls ever onward, accruing the sensations and ironies of conscious living till the final effect is massive. This is not prose for people who like their fiction with a cool, Calvin Klein-like minimalism. Bowen's people are keenly aware, and she seems to catalogue every sweaty moment, every betraying glance. The reader must stay right there with her, because hidden among lengthy descriptions of sea air and drawing-room politics are pithy asides worthy of great humorists: "Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends." Skimmers miss out.

The Death of the Heartis Bowen's most perfectly made book. Portia, an orphan, comes to live in London with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna. A child of sin raised in a series of shabby French hotels, Portia is possessed of a kind of terrible innocence. Like Chance the Gardener in pigtails, she literally can't comprehend evil or unkind motives. Unfortunately for her, she falls in with Anna's friend Eddie, who seems to be made entirely of bad motives. Though the plot follows Portia's relationship with Eddie, the novel's real tension lies between Portia and Anna, as the girl comes to grief against the shoals of Anna's glittering, urbane cynicism. But the book transcends the theme of innocence corrupted. As in Graham Greene'sThe Quiet American, Bowen inverts the formula to show the destructive power of innocence itself:

Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous.... Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet--and when they do, their victims lie strewn all around.

Bowen has a fine eye for such shadings of morality, but finer still is her understanding of the way humans bump up against the material world. Her writing on weather, both emotional and meteorological, compares with the best of Henry James: "One's first day by the sea, one's being feels salt, strong, resilient, and hollow--like a seaweed pod not giving under the heel."

Always a sensitive observer of the way we live, in her lesser books Bowen deals in mind games and then delivers trumped-up, bloody endings. InThe Death of the Heart, she keeps all the action between her characters' ears, and comes up with one of the great midcentury psychological novels.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Something about the structure of my brain, its associative, porous, open-endedness, was defenseless against the ever-enlarging Web. Every video, news story, photo, e-mail, stock chart, sexy picture, and five-day weather forecast was an enticement to step into the forest, and once I was two or three breadcrumbs down the path, the witches had me, I was in their oven. Most of life's temptations go way back; they're ancient and perennial, and one is warned about them in one's youth, but this temptation had appeared from nowhere.

- Walter Kirn

I cannot BELIEVE how much fucking time I wasted on Tumblr today. And after I've taken I don't know how many hiatus (hiatii? hah) from that goddamn site! No more. No más!

....Elizabeth thought this was going pretty far;
and she listened with increasing astonishment as the housekeeper added,
"I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him
ever since he was four years old."

....There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle
sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of
their acquaintance. The commendation bestowed on him by Mrs. Reynolds
was of no trifling nature. What praise is more valuable than the praise
of an intelligent servant? As a brother, a landlord, a master, she
considered how many people's happiness were in his guardianship!—How
much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow!—How much of
good or evil must be done by him! Every idea that had been brought
forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, and as she
stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes
upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of
gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and
softened its impropriety of expression.

The premise is that Baker is exploring the lives of the Bennetts' (from Pride and Prejudice) servants, in order to write a book about class discrepancies in Regency England. And I think this book would have been much more enjoyable if she had not done the riff on Austen, although that is the book's gimmick and who knows if it would have sold otherwise. But it means that she's just slamming beloved characters left and right, including having Lizzie sneer that referring to the footman as "Mr. Smith" made her think the speaker "meant a gentleman", which doesn't ring true at all. And I put up with it the first fourteen times our heroine, the Bennett girls' maid, thinks, "Jane and Elizabeth have X, Y, and Z and are still not grateful, while I would be content with half a potato sack to make socks out of BECAUSE SERVANT CLASS", but the next forty-five times I read the same sentiment it's rather like the Monty Python Yorkshiremen sketch: "Elizabeth gets Mr. Darcy, while GIRLS LIKE ME would be happy to have a rotting warthog carcass to warm our bare feet because we ate our shoes last spring and no one will spare a potato sack".

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

The worm drives helically through the woodAnd does not know the dust left in the boreOnce made the table integral and good;And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;The names of lovers, light of other daysPerhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.But memory is everything to lose;Although some of the colors have to fade,Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.Regret, by definition, comes too late;Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

Reading is performance. The reader— the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk— performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

Can I get used to it day after day a little at a time while the tide keeps coming in faster the waves get bigger building on each other breaking records this is not the world that I remember then comes the day when I open the box that I remember packing with such care and there is the face that I had known well in little pieces staring up at me it is not mentioned on the front pages but somewhere far back near the real estate among the things that happen every day to someone who now happens to be me and what can I do and who can tell me then there is what the doctor comes to say endless patience will never be enough the only hope is to be the daylight

Sunday, July 20, 2014

I think the first thing—if you want to be a writer—the first thing you
need to do is write. Which sounds like an obvious piece of advice. But
so many people have this feeling they want to be a writer and they love
to read but they don’t actually write very much. The main part of being a
writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end,
uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and
really sinking into the work and writing. That’s how I write. That’s how
writing gets done.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

EDRANTS: "They are largely white women who are almost totally in the dark about
their privilege, many bolstering a blinkered neoliberal feminism that
demands a rectifying army of Mikki Kendalls and Djuna Barneses"

MOI: Who wha motherfucking what

EDRANTS: "But when a minx’s head is so deeply deposited up her own slimy passage"

MOI: Oh fuck you, you sexist pathetic bastard, you --

FIRST COMMENT ON EDRANTS, FROM "DEPRESSED READER": Everyone who's read anything she’s written knows that Emily Gould is
vapid, vicious and fame-hungry, and not particularly interesting beyond
that. But man, you have some deeply pathological obsession going on here. I would delete this post if I were you and seek professional help.

MOI: SO SAY WE ALL. JESUS HARRIET TUBMAN CHRIST.
TWITTER: //blows up (Are all these people in New York sitting in the same Starbucks composing Tweets about each other on their laptops while they're five feet away? I guess so? Do they ever go outside?)

MOI: But who the fuck is this? Why is he vaguely familiar....very, very vaguely....

EDRANTS: No job no money no hope, I go to throw myself off a bridge! GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD THIS IS NOT A DRILL

MOI: ....have Hugo Schwyzer and this guy ever been seen in the same room together at the same time?

*Roxane Gay left us out of her 'places where people write which aren't New York' post -- I thought I ranted about this on my blog, but now I think it was on GoodReads, which I don't use anymore -- and although the Stanford Creative Writing Program, founded in 1946 by Wallace Stegner, was the second in the country after Iowa, we didn't figure much in MFA v NYC (which one's Alien and which one's Predator?), either.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been
given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it
would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life
is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto
life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her
books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with
leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with
savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and
anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness
and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to
our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes
what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner
privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’
prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.

....There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of
self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can
feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner
selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of
solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that “street haunting,”
as she called it, allows you to lose and then find yourself in the
rhythm of urban novelty and familiarity. She was drawn to the figure of
the hostess: the woman-to-be-looked-at, standing at the top of the
stairs, friendly to everyone, who grows only more mysterious with her
visibility. (One of the pleasures of throwing a party, Woolf showed, is
that it allows you to surprise yourself: surrounded by your friends, the
center of attention, you feel your separateness from the social world
you have convened.) She showed how parents, friends, lovers, and spouses
can become more unknowable over time, not less—there is a core to their
personhood that never gives itself up. Even as they put their lives on
display, she thought, artists thrive when they maintain a final redoubt
of privacy—a wellspring that remains unpolluted by the world outside.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

I kind of played against what was “good” or “successful” and ultimately
quit Twitter because I found myself repulsive, caring and craving so
much for witness and recognition, and warring against myself whether to
promote myself on Twitter or retweet praise or write about the process
of writing, which felt at times like a sort of promotion, a real-time
behind-the-scenes I’m Writing! Read my Next Book Entitled Suicide is
Amazing in 2016!—even though I like writing about process, and I like
reading about writer’s processes....Basically,
whenever I think I’m doing something that would be good for publicity, I
wind up bailing on it. Maybe I have issues with success. I find failure
more interesting. I also think in general the writers who use Twitter
to promote themselves or their projects, instead of writing about ideas
or writing about reading or posting weird jokes or having a conceptual
project, were the ones I found really boring, like being at a publishing
party, and it made me cynical about being on Twitter myself.

....I think noticing
who was following me or unfollowing me based on something I wrote
depressed me in small yet critical ways, or made me think of writing
something to appeal to more readers—which I found poisonous as a
writer—all that sort of currency, or thinking of being a writer as
publishing, or as being an author, or as having cultural capital,
instead of as reading and writing. Also feeling a fixed identity—a
box—and I felt like I was not able to change or refine ideas or be in
the process of becoming. That’s why I quit the online world, for now.

After the last book came out, I needed to calibrate things offline, and
go back to having a private life, to mourn or complain or read privately
for a while. Writer friends or online friends or people who like
reading me will still often write me and say they miss my online
presence—which is nice, but also a strange feeling, like you don’t exist
if you’re not on social media, or that your online presence is what
they read of you. There’s this pressure to be continually writing on the
Internet in order to stay a writer. But I kind of like the feeling of
being invisible, of not existing for a while. I think I’ve been
interested lately in a poetics of anonymity, a performance of
invisibility. Maybe that’s why I like twitter accounts that immolate
themselves and are performative/ephemeral. Like I think Kafka would have
been really brilliant at twitter, but he would have had 40 followers
and would have been disgusted with himself and quit it often.

Do not, under any circumstances, delete your blog. Close comments, take
it off your bookmarks, and for God’s sake if you had a Google alert
deactivate it. Set it to private if you must. But leave it there. Your
blog may not seem consequential to you, but it is part of a complex
network that includes other people’s memories, experiences,
conversations, and, less esoterically, links. To delete it creates a
tear in the history and meaning of that network.

You are not a waste. You are not wasted. No part of you will ever be
wasted. When you are done being you, every one of your atoms will go on
to do something else. You will never run out of things to be, until the
day when nothing is anything at all anymore.

So you’ve got all of that going for you.

Do you create? You’re a miracle. Do you create badly? You’re still a
miracle, and just because you create badly now doesn’t mean you always
will. Do you think you don’t create enough? You create as much as you
should, and if you should create more than you do, you’ll find a way to
do so. Do you have things left unfinished? You can finish them. If it
turns out you can’t, you can’t. It’s not a crime. Forgive yourself for
it.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

The Great Recession should have put the victim-blaming theory of poverty
to rest. In the space of only a few months, millions of people entered
the ranks of the officially poor—not only laid-off blue-collar workers,
but also downsized tech workers, managers, lawyers, and other
once-comfortable professionals. No one could accuse these “nouveau poor”
Americans of having made bad choices or bad lifestyle decisions. They
were educated, hardworking, and ambitious, and now they were also
poor—applying for food stamps, showing up in shelters, lining up for
entry-level jobs in retail. This would have been the moment for the
pundits to finally admit the truth: Poverty is not a character failing
or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

The Music of Chance, Paul AusterThe Last Nude, Ellis AveryGhosts, John Banville Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism, Nancy BauerThe Mandarins, Simone de BeauvoirThe Face in the Frost, John BellairsPhantoms on the Bookshelves, Jacques BonnetThe Story of Pain, Joanna BourkeMrs Poe, Lynn Cullen Olivia Manning: A Woman at War, Deirdre DavidA Bone from a Dry Sea, Peter DickinsonSuspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness, Joel GoldFriendship: A Novel, Emily Gould (someone gave this to me, she doesn't need my money)The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, Nick HornbyThe Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo, Paula HuntleyCalifornia, Edan Lupecki (a little worried this will be the Flamethrowers of the season, i.e. the book everyone LOVED and I inevitably didn't) (ETA: SURPRISE, this is exactly what it was. sigh)D.H. Lawrence: A Biography, Jeffrey MeyersWhat Matters in Jane Austen, John Mullan The Whispering: A haunted house mystery, Sarah RayneThe Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, Pietra Rivoli Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography, Carl RollysonThe Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading, Phyllis RoseThe Mabinogion Tetralogy, Evangeline Walton

So what did I ACTUALLY read today? I reread....We Have Always Lived in the Castle, for the nth time. //facedesk (Shirley Jackson is my homegirl forever.)

SUCCUBUS:
I'll drain you dry and make you love it. Also, I have pure black hair,
midnight eyes, and the rest of my body is freezing ivory, including my
nipples.

MOI: WHOAH

SUCCUBUS: //is gotten the best of by Not!Constantine, vanishes for the next 200 pages

MOI: //pines

NOT!CONSTANTINE: omg no I broke my tin whistle

MOI: .....I heard that happens to every guy at least once in his lifetime, honey.

MIKE
CAREY: Here, have pages and pages of detailed descriptions of sex
trafficking, rape and murder. It's so awful. Let me describe it some
more, very graphically! In all its awfulness! The violation of women, done by one man and told to another!

SUCCUBUS: TIME TO EAT SOME ABDUCTING RAPING MURDEROUS BASTARD GANGSTERS

MOI: YAY

SUCCUBUS: //does satisfying violence to everyone, which is described much more briefly than the reported retrospective raping and murdering earlier

NOT!CONSTANTINE: //kneels and bows head

SUCCUBUS:
"My mark is on you. I can whistle for your body or for your soul, and
you'll bring them to me and beg me to take them. You wear my chain,
which can never be broken."

NOT!CONSTANTINE: "Without looking up, without meeting her gaze, I nodded."

MOI: YOWZA

MIKE CAREY: How about a touching emotional reunion between the living and dead sisters?

MOI: Does the succubus come back in the sequels?

NOT!CONSTANTINE: Oh yeah.

MOI: Okay.

NOT!CONSTANTINE: "Discretion is another virtue I've never really got the hang of, but I decided at that point that a breath of fresh air would do me a world of good." //leaves sisters to their touching emotional reunion offpage

MOI: HEY

SUCCUBUS: It's OK, in the sequels I'll teach them about the Bechdel test. And they'll like it.

After getting really really dreadful news -- I mean actually fucking tragic news, the kind of news that would delight your born enemy and worst persecutor -- I wound up rereading about half of MaddAddam; I skipped around at first, then settled in at about page 150 or a bit later. (Yes I was reading a paper book. I needed that, right then.) (Also that book's so much about writing and reading and learning and storytelling it does seem -- just a bit -- obscene to read it in pixels.) I am always surprised all over again, every time, at how great art cheers you and lifts you up and heartens you, like brandy for the soul, or something. Like Mozart. (I consider all three books of that trilogy masterpieces and if you disagree, I will fight you.) The great pleasure at being pleased. The older we get, the more like our childhood selves we grow, I guess; in reaction to horrible news, some people scream, some cry, some drink, some eat, some blog. I read. I've always been that way, since I was a kid.

Several days ago I fell through the wormhole of My Life as a Fake -- kept on reading, reading, reading: at first forcing myself into the story a bit but then utterly caught up in it, then going faster, too fast, gulping it all down. (Also read as a paper book.) Finished it in a day (don't look at me like that, it's not that long). I....don't know if I enjoyed it very much, actually. It really was quite well-written. I thought it would be much more about the Australian literary scene than Kuala Lumpur, and non-white people didn't really appear, except as rather violent and ignorant walking plot points. But it was a bit like when I first read The Moon and Sixpence, I didn't much like the people in it, but once the master storyteller starts talking in your head, you have no choice but to listen, "ensorcelled," as Anais Nin would say. Carey can create an amazing mental gravity well from sheer narrative drive, I'll give him that. -- But I also wasn't happy with the portrayal of women -- yes, it's narrated by one, but she keeps insisting she's sexless (and is yet also....a lesbian? what) and the other very few women who appear are just walking Animas. And then of course all my criticisms collapsed in the face of the absolutely wrongheaded Grauniad review -- it has that structure because it's BASED ON FRANKENSTEIN, you dolt! Not the movie, the novel, which is all about people telling you what's in letters, and letters describing what other people said, about what still other people said someone else said. Gahh. I am sure I missed out on 90% of the Frankenstein references, it's been so long since I read that book (and frankly most of it is a slog), and even I got that. And Morrison misspells the hoax's historian's name as "Hayward," which is the kind of thing nobody but me ever cares about, but I got sore because it made the "definitive story" WHOSE TITLE GOES UNMENTIONED damn hard to Google. (For the record, it's The Ern Malley Affair, by Michael Heyward, which I will probably wind up getting out of the library, since it appears to have sunk into oblivion.) (There is, inevitably, a website: http://www.ernmalley.com/.)

Before that, I had utter period brain, and because I've reread the Pratchett Witches books (only my favourites: Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords & Ladies, and Carpe Jugulum as a chaser) so many times, I reread the Harry Potter series instead -- I think I'd read the first two books God knows how long ago, skimmed the third, and skimmed the last. This time I sat through it all....no, I lie, I skipped four and five, again, four because it was so laden with sports competitions I just couldn't even try, and five because one of my giant red buttons is when a beloved shelter turns into a nasty horrifying trap. No personal issues THERE, I assure you. Was, as before, very unimpressed. Also, when you read the whole series straight through, the DIRE shift in tone about halfway through the fourth book is really jarring. It goes from something you could read aloud at an eight-year-old's bedtime to Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies -- for so long, I thought that was a joke! My problem before had always been that I loathed Harry too much to read an entire series about him, but he seemed wispy enough I was able to pretty much ignore him this time around. Loved Hermione, as usual (I was Hermione -- can there be any doubt? Jo was Hermione, too -- why, oh why, couldn't the book have been about her?). No, this time the giant stumbling block in my path was RON, who seemed like a horrible Nice Guy with terrible jealousy and anger issues. I took to tapping out "!" and "!!!" and "JERK" and "JACKOFF" on my Paperwhite screen every time he appeared. I liked Ginny more than most people did (even my friends who liked the series thought she had no personality), but that was probably because I saw her as a junior Molly Weasley, whom I adored. Some dear friends had to put up with hormone-addled e-missives like "OMG HEDWIG" and "someone tell me Ron goddamn Weasel fucking dies in the end" and "seriously wtf is this obsession Rowling has with fucking pumpkin juice, it shows up at EVERY meal" (I loathe pumpkins only slightly less than I loathe beets), but fortunately this was apparently somewhat entertaining. The epilogue still sucks, and I still think there's no sparkage between Hermione and Ron //shudders -- Rowling definitely shifted to Team Harry several volumes into the actual writing. But she stuck with her Seven Year Plan, which is why the epilogue sucks.

(From yet another email: "But the bit in Not!Heaven with Dumbleduns was puzzling. Who the fuck was the baby? D's sister? What?")

Oh yes, and today I reread Friend of My Youth, some stories (the title one, "Meneseteung," "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," "Oh, What Avails," and "Differently," which I believe I first read in the New Yorker) more than once. I don't think this volume is anyone's favourite, but it's the first Munro book I ever read, and I think a lot of it still holds up. I was meaning to read and reread all her books (in chronological order, of course!) after she won the Nobel, and this has been sitting around on my Paperwhite forever to remind me to begin that particular reading project, but I just reread it instead. Whoops.

mothers and men

Hither rushed all the throng, streaming to the banks; mothers and men and bodies of high-souled heroes, their life now done, boys and unwedded girls, and sons placed on the pyre before their fathers’ eyes; thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn’s first frost drop and fall, and thick as the birds that from the seething deep flock shoreward, when the chill of the year drives them overseas and sends them into sunny lands.